While I agree that man is probably not alone in the universe, I don’t think it matters.
To start with, let’s just forget the idea of “universe” right now, and think “Milky Way galaxy”, because the distance between galaxies is truly staggering. Whereas the distance to the next habitable planet might be a mere 200 to 400 light years away.
Let’s ponder that, in turn. If something is only 1 light year away, traveling at the speed of light, that is, if you can travel only at half the speed of light, it is 2 years away. A 10th the speed of light, 10 years away, etc.
Our fastest spaceship would reach the star closest to us, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away, in about 74,000 years. That’s at the blindingly slow speed of 38,000 miles per hour.
But that is just distance. Our other problem is time.
The Milky Way galaxy is about 13 billion years old. Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old. Life on Earth is much younger, and intelligent life perhaps only 100,000 years old. Any ability for us to communicate outside of our world is about 150 years.
150 years, or even 100,000 years, out of 13 billion years, in windows of time of which millions of civilizations could have existed for millions of years, yet not at the same time as us.
And not all parts of the Milky Way are equal. Entire sectors of the Milky Way have been sterilized by cosmic events. Which could have eradicated life on millions of worlds.
So what about alien visitations? Well, if they can travel much faster than light, can figure out which planets sustain life, and which ones have intelligent life, and done it when the human species existed and could recognize them as aliens, then good for them.
At the Suntrade Institute we have always used the analogy of dropping a pebble into a tub of water, sending out its transitory signal (wave disturbance), but with only a remote chance of being intercepted by another dropping pebble while contacting the surface. There may be plenty of wavelets but little interaction in the vast expanse of space-time, considering of course that the lifetime of the subject civilizations is small within that expanse.
There is an existing "Drake" theory of the probability of extraterrestrial life, totally off base, and simply a naive analysis.
On the other hand the psychology of Capt Mitchell, ala:
Mitchell and his fellow explorers of what he has called the "Frontiers of Consciousness" have long contended that broader public awareness of the extraterrestrial presence and interactions the astronaut-scientist believes are reality could help promote a "global mind change."
is extraordinarily revealing about life on Earth. That is, some desperate groping among some for something external, that should (and could) be resolved internally with what we've experienced.
I will bet anything, anything, that Edgar Mitchell, even considering that he is a Navy Capt, voted for Barack Obama. That is the psychology we are dealing with in the USA today. A sick immature nation in our view.
Johnny Suntrade, The Suntrade Institute
I think intelligent life abounds in the universe, but we are all isolated in our own little spheres of time and space, and will never interact directly.
We may leave some detectable wavelengths that will be analyzed in a billion years, a billion light years away. Or we may detect some from some civilization that blipped out three billion years ago.
But nobody's stopping by for tea and anal probes.
excellent post